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Who were the "prisoners"? (Spoilers inside!)
posted by Daddie0STAFFMOD on April 8, 2018 at 12:34 AM
I missed this film when it first came out and only heard of it through a casual recommend here on TMDB (thx TMDB Community!). It was a good film, and far better than many these days, but I couldn't help but wonder at the title.
(Again...spoilers to follow...)
So it is obvious early on that the girls are "prisoners" (or, perhaps more accurately we hope they are). Then the plot twists comes when the man-child is taken prisoner. But neither of these characters seemed to satisfy my curiosity about the title.
Thinking more deeply about it, the detective is a "prisoner" of sorts: having solved every crime and perpetually alone; then the white mom (sorry too lazy to look up her name) as she seeks to sleep and medicate herself through the ordeal; the black father who is isolated in his desire not to justify one egregious act for another; and lastly the white father who can't see past his own responsibility and anger given the situation he is facing. Also, of course, the enduring kidnappees (is that a word? #coinedit!) who are so imprisoned that they mindlessly participate in kidnapping others.
Did anyone else notice this theme? Did I miss anyone? Am I just thinking too deeply about all of it? (Not likely as the current ratings are higher than I was willing to give...so my guess is others are seeing something deeper that I have missed.)
Reply by Renovatio
on April 8, 2018 at 6:04 AM
I got that as well... They were all prisoners in one way or another, physically, emotionally, psychologically, etc... Prisoners of their behaviour, their minds and their beliefs, etc...
Adds another dimension, rather than just being a crime thriller...
Reply by DRDMovieMusings
on July 30, 2023 at 4:50 PM
SPOILER ALERT - IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED THIS MOVIE AND STILL PLAN TO, STOP READING, WATCH IT, THEN CIRCLE BACK HERE.
IF YOU PROCEED, YOU DO SO ACCEPTING THAT YOU WILL READ DETAILS HERE THAT MAY SPOIL YOUR FIRST-TIME VIEWING EXPERIENCE, AND IT'S NOT MY FAULT IF YOU READ BEYOND THIS POINT AND SUCH OCCURS.
YOU HAVE BEEN ADVISED.
I think one of the failings of this movie is its not providing sufficient time to appreciate the scope of the motive of the actual antagonist - Mrs. Jones.
Her anger at God for losing her child to cancer created a long, slow, burn. She was diabolical, calculating, and had escaped even suspicion while SIXTEEN kids disappeared.
On reflection, I'm willing to bet the body in the priest's cellar was Mr. Jones. And the priest was a prisoner of his oath - Jones confessed but the priest wouldn't divulge what was confessed to him in confidence to even send an anonymous tip to police to search Mrs. Jones' property. He was a prisoner of his faith, and it haunted him to drinking away the turmoil, the internal confict.
At any rate, few of the threads spend any time talking about Mrs. Jones because the movie spent so much time distracting us, the audience, about who else it might have been, up to and including what was going on with Keller when he ran out of the hospital. It just seemed we were directed to put so much energy into Alex, and then the weirdo with the snakes and pig's head who shot himself in the police interrogation, and wondering if/when the priest was coming back into it... but very little screen time to come to terms with the revelation of Mrs. Jones after all.
Compare with a movie like The Silence of the Lambs. Not only do we the audience know who the antagonist is earlier in the film, the entire investigation is an exploration of his motives. The suspense is Hitchcockian - we the audience know something the main protagonist does not know, and the tension is waiting for the when and how they finally find out.
Whereas, in Prisoners, we don't know any more than the protagonists, so we're not "in on the secret", we're just as lost as the protagonists, grasping at every possible lead, and trapped waiting along woth them to know what the hell is going on. It's harder to emote with them when we are caught up in our own emotions.
Same with a movie like Taken. We the audience see what happened to the daughter. Now we can come along for the ride as the father figures it who, where, when, and why.
There's a formula to this. Kudos to the writers and producers for having the courage to try breaking from the formula, but it's not surprising the two example movies did better financially, while this one didn't do as well. We were prisoners, too, and prisoners - whether the characters in the story, or we the audience - don't enjoy the experience.